Body Line

‘What I may or may not suppose is beside the point,’ Slider said. ‘I deal in facts, and the fact is that you have lied to me, and I don’t like it. Lies make me restless. I have to know what’s behind them.’

‘I didn’t lie to you,’ she said indignantly, but there was a consciousness in her eyes, and a wariness. Atherton noted it with interest. She was wondering which lies had been uncovered, he thought – which argued that there had been several of them.

‘There are lies of commission, and lies of omission,’ Slider said. ‘Perhaps a purist might ease their conscience over the latter, but there’s no excuse for the former. You told me that you hadn’t spoken to your former husband for months, and that you only spoke to him about once a year anyway. But we know that you have spoken to him frequently in the last few weeks. And that you had a long telephone conversation with him only a week before his death.’

And suddenly she was quite calm again. She straightened her shoulders, laid her hands before her on the desk, and said, as if it were a normal interview and she was in control of it, ‘The telephone conversations had nothing to do with your investigation, and my not telling you of them has not hampered you in any way. Really, these are very trivial matters to come trampling in here threatening me about. I have a mind to make an official complaint about your behaviour, Inspector Slider. You may not be aware that the Chief Constable of Hertfordshire is a very great personal friend of mine.’

‘I’m afraid he does not have any authority over me,’ Slider gave her back calmly. If she was threatening him, she must have something to hide, which only spurred him on. ‘The Metropolitan Police report directly to the Home Secretary.’

She smiled unpleasantly. ‘Please don’t suppose that I have never met him, either. Is that it?’

‘You told us your husband’s specialty was urology, but in fact he was in plastic surgery.’

That caused her a little flicker, but she came back smoothly. ‘He began in urology, but he changed to plastics when an opportunity came up. Again, it had nothing to do with your investigation. And what are these so-called sins of omission? Equally trivial, I have no doubt.’

This was not the way round Slider wanted to do the interview, but he had not managed to shake her sufficiently. ‘You didn’t tell us that your husband had been arrested for indecent assault.’

‘My ex-husband. No, why should I? It was a long time ago. It’s none of my business now, and none of yours either.’

‘I’d like to know something about it.’

‘Look it up in the papers. I’m sure it’s all there. It is not something I wish to talk about.’

‘Was that why you got divorced?’

‘Really, I will not answer questions about my private life. It was more than ten years ago. It has nothing to do with anything in the present, and I refuse to satisfy your prurient and idle curiosity. You should be concentrating on finding out who killed David, not harassing responsible citizens and interfering with their work. If that is all you have to say I must ask you to leave. I am too busy for this nonsense.’

Slider studied her for a moment and she held his look unflinchingly. Quietly, he tried, ‘You didn’t tell us that you had put a large amount of money into Hillbrow Equestrian Centre.’

Now that was interesting. That one, which ought to have received only a puzzled ‘what’s that got to do with anything?’, actually made her blink. You could see her trying to think her way through it. Finally she said, ‘My financial relationship with Hillbrow is none of your business.’ It was the finance that bothered her. Not passion, but money? There was definitely something to be found out, and he meant to find it.

‘Where was Mr Frith on Monday morning?’ he asked.

She was still puzzled, he could see, but she had taken comfort from this new direction. ‘You had better ask him,’ she said.

‘I’m asking you.’

‘I am not disposed to tell you,’ she said grandly.

‘Do you want to be arrested?’ he asked with assumed incredulity.

‘I know very well that you will not do any such thing.’

‘Are you quite sure of that?’

They locked eyes across the desk, and it was Amanda who flinched. She looked away, towards the window. ‘He went to work as usual.’

‘At what time?’

‘He generally leaves at six or six fifteen.’

‘What time did he leave on Monday?’

‘I think it was – six fifteen. Yes, a quarter past six.’

‘Does he drive to work?’

‘Yes, of course. How else could he get there?’

‘What sort of car does he drive?’

‘A four-by-four. A Shogun.’

‘Does he have any other car?’

‘No. Why would he need two?’

‘But you have a car.’

‘Of course. We are not joined at the hip,’ she snapped, seeming annoyed by the idea that she might not need a car if he had one. ‘I have a BMW 750Li.’

Atherton was too well trained to stir at that, but Slider felt his gladness. ‘But in fact, Mr Frith did not go to work as usual on Monday. He told his staff he was working from home and going straight from there to an appointment at eleven. But the appointment was also fictitious.’

Now that did move her. She did not speak, only stared at Slider blankly, with some furious thinking evidently going on behind the marble frontage.

‘Would you like to reconsider your statement to me?’ Slider offered.

Her voice was faint and strained. ‘Yes – I – made a mistake. Monday – yes – that was different. He was working from home. Some paperwork. He was still there when I left for work myself at a quarter past eight.’ She rallied, composed herself, and said coldly, ‘It is easy enough to mistake one day for another. My work here is important and occupies my mind to the exclusion of trivial domestic detail.’

Nice save, Slider thought. But not good enough. He switched direction in the hope of unbalancing her again. ‘What did you and David Rogers talk about during that last conversation?’

It took her a second to answer. ‘I don’t remember,’ she said, and he could see it was a lie.

‘It was a long call. Nearly twenty minutes. I’m sure you must remember it.’

‘I remember the call,’ she said with faint irritability. ‘I don’t remember what was said. Just general chit-chat. Nothing important.’

‘So you were on friendly terms with him,’ Slider said. ‘One doesn’t chit-chat for twenty minutes on unimportant subjects except with people one is close to.’

She looked at him, trying to work out the implications of the statement, and did not answer.

‘But you told me you were not close, that you had no idea what he was doing, that you had little contact with him.’

She shifted in her seat. ‘I don’t know what he does, and I don’t want to know. And I don’t normally have much contact with him. Just lately he has rung me a couple of times. I can’t tell you why. Perhaps he was bored. Or lonely. He was a weak man, the sort who can never be satisfied with his own company. Always had to be doing something, going somewhere, meeting someone.’ She seemed to be growing annoyed at the memory. ‘He was weak and unreliable and irresolute, and he made my life hell –’ she did not exactly pause, but the rest of the sentence came out in a very different tone, as if she had heard herself and corrected it – ‘but we were married for a long time, so I suppose there was still a fondness there for him. I’m sorry he’s dead. And particularly that he was killed in that shocking way.’

Outside, Atherton said, ‘Well, I don’t know that that gets us any further forward. Except that she has a BMW. And she gave Frith an alibi.’

‘Unfortunately. If she didn’t leave for work until eight fifteen he’s covered,’ Slider said. ‘Even on the normal schedule he couldn’t have left at six and been in Shepherd’s Bush at ten past.’

‘But if he was doing the job for her, we can’t take her word,’ said Atherton. ‘And as there were just the two